Nasir al-Din al-Tusi was still a young man when the Assassins made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
His hometown had been devastated by Mongol armies, and so, early in the 13th century, al-Tusi, a promising astronomer and philosopher, came to dwell in the legendary fortress city of Alamut in the mountains of northern Persia.
He lived among a heretical and secretive sect of Shiite Muslims, whose members practiced political murder as a tactic and were dubbed hashishinn, legend has it, because of their use of hashish.
Although al-Tusi later said he had been held in Alamut against his will, the library there was renowned for its excellence, and al-Tusi thrived there, publishing works on astronomy, ethics, mathematics and philosophy that marked him as one of the great intellectuals of his age.
But when the armies of Halagu, the grandson of Genghis Khan, massed outside the city in 1256, al-Tusi had little trouble deciding where his loyalties lay. He joined Halagu and accompanied him to Baghdad, which fell in 1258. The grateful Halagu built him an observatory at Maragha, in what is now northwestern Iran.
Al-Tusi’s deftness and ideological flexibility in pursuit of the resources to do science paid off. The road to modern astronomy, scholars say, leads through the work that he and his followers performed at Maragha and Alamut in the 13th and 14th centuries. It is a road that winds from Athens to Alexandria, Baghdad, Damascus and Córdoba, through the palaces of caliphs and the basement laboratories of alchemists, and it was traveled not just by astronomy but by all science.
Commanded by the Koran to seek knowledge and read nature for signs of the Creator, and inspired by a treasure trove of ancient Greek learning, Muslims created a society that in the Middle Ages was the scientific center of the world. The Arabic language was synonymous with learning and science for 500 hundred years, a golden age that can count among its credits the precursors to modern universities, algebra, the names of the stars and even the notion of science as an empirical inquiry.
”Nothing in Europe could hold a candle to what was going on in the Islamic world until about 1600,” said Dr. Jamil Ragep, a professor of the history of science at the University of Oklahoma.
It was the infusion of this knowledge into Western Europe, historians say, that fueled the Renaissance and the scientific revolution.
”Civilizations don’t just clash,” said Dr. Abdelhamid Sabra, a retired professor of the history of Arabic science who taught at Harvard. ”They can learn from each other. Islam is a good example of that.” The intellectual meeting of Arabia and Greece was one of the greatest events in history, he said. ”Its scale and consequences are enormous, not just for Islam but for Europe and the world.”
